Mumblings underground

Alas, it's farewell to Dennis Hopper, an actor who deserves to be remembered for many things, including some of the most enthusiastic swearing in cinema. He never appeared in Doctor Who, but perhaps more surprisingly, he almost did. According to Russell T. Davies's book, the Hopp* was approached to appear in Voyage Of The Damned, first as Mr Copper (crikey, that would have been weird) and then as Max Capricorn (that would have been... kind of pointless?) but apparently he wasn't free, so it never happened.

Anyway, that brings me onto this week's Doctor Who and a few thoughts about Cold Blood:

Foreshadowing, your clue to predictable drama! The reprise of the hillside waving and the ring on the TARDIS console were a huge clue that these things were going to be Significant (TM), and if "time was in flux" and Amy was pretty safe as a main character, I suspected that Rory might be scrabbling for his P45 before the episode was out. It's the NHS making cuts already, innit?

"This is the story of our planet..." - Ah, even more gloomy foreshadowing, this time from the leader of the lizarding world. As far as alien voiceovers are concerned, I'm afraid he lost points for sounding like his bits of extra explanation were pasted on later AND for being nowhere near as galactically strident as Rassilon. Rather less spittle to clean off the camera lens, though.

The whole "oops, how do we mention that we've killed our hostage?" sequence at the church seemed to have wandered in from some other production entirely, perhaps a black comedy heist movie. Somehow it totally missed the mark for "tragic and dangerously raising the dramatic stakes" and hit "socially awkward, let's all stand around".

The Doctor's decontamination must have killed off some of his common sense, because the idea of making Nasreen and Amy discuss the future of the human and Silurian races was utterly silly - as if any world government would ever listen to or act like them. Amy reacts by doing "OMG I am so BORED" teenage sulking at first, which isn't a great start, but maybe she's just as unconvinced by the idea as I am. Then she wakes up and makes a point, but it's a fairly poor one. If she'd ever paid attention in GCSE geography, she'd know that the Australian Outback and the Sahara Desert etc. HAVE PEOPLE LIVING IN THEM. A not-very-dense population is still a population and they're not going to be happy to be shoved off their land (AGAIN, in some cases) for a bunch of lizards, are they? Even if the lizards know how to build wind farms or whatever it is.

Blimey, I'm scrabbling around to find anything I liked here. Oh, the army of lizard women, that was a nice idea. It was just a shame that they were all so easily disarmed by a bit of sonic flashing and went scampering back home at the first sign of poison gas.

If Silurian Scientist Guy was so darned nice, why did he slice Mo open last week? Friendly curiosity?

This is surely the first time a companion has died and I've said out loud at the television "Oh, thank goodness for that!" But honestly, I simply can't see Rory as anything other than a waste of space. Never mind the cracks wiping his memory from the universe; I pretty much forgot about him every time he wandered off screen. Perhaps his forgettability was intentional, a clever piece of meta-comment? But no, I tend to think he was just rubbish.

Dramatically his demise didn't work for me either, because it occurred in an awkward clash between two storylines: the plot-of-the-week and the ongoing (but still rather vague) Big Crack story, which needed a shoehorned-in flashback about the threat of being wiped out of time in order to make any sense. Still, I suppose it all gives credence to the theory that the Doctor's chat to closed-eyes Amy in Flesh and Stone was him going back in time, because that was all about telling Amy to REMEMBER HIM. Since the Doctor himself is obviously not going to disappear into oblivion forever, then presumably this means that the forgetting can be undone, does it? I sort of wondered whether Rory's death could be undone too, but I can't see how: the cracks just remove the memory, but the event itself was not crack-related.

Bye bye, Nasreen. I hope you and Tony have fun a thousand years in the future. At least you didn't die. Be grateful for small mercies.

In conclusion: Less emotionally involving than the Eurovision Song Contest, and that's saying something. Oh dear, I don't think I really care about this programme any more.

In other news, my Mini-Icon Requestathon is still on-going. I haven't finished many yet, but I am scribbling away, never fear. Feel free to add a suggestion - and do note, asking for a single character and providing a picture reference may well maximize your chances of a result...

* I don't think anyone ever called him this. No one dared, most likely.